Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a tweet Saturday declaring that “today and everyday is 1776” only hours after denying under oath that she knew the term was sometimes used as far-right shorthand for violent uprising.
The post came the morning after the extremist Georgia Republican was repeatedly asked about the term in a court hearing over whether she can run for reelection under the 14th Amendment, which bars elected representatives from participating in insurrections.
In a Georgia courtroom on Friday, Greene had been shown a video of an interview she gave to Newsmax the day before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Greene said she did not remember speaking to the outlet, a tactic she used many times when confronted on the stand with records of her past statements.
“This is our 1776 moment,” she told the Newsmax host in the clip, saying that specific sentiment was shared by many of her GOP colleagues.
While 1776 is, of course, a crucially important year in American history, it has also been co-opted by far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the extremist organization behind the online store “1776.shop.” Some of the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol last year were pictured wearing items of clothing with “1776” featured prominently, likening protest of Trump’s election loss to revolution.
Greene told attorney Andrew Celli, who represents the group of voters suing her, that she didn’t “know much about the Proud Boys.”
Greene had urged her supporters to turn out the day of Jan. 6, 2021, to protest Donald Trump’s election loss. But the congresswoman claimed that she had never heard anybody talk about violence in connection with the protest, or that she had ever advocated for violence to achieve political ends. From the stand, she said that “1776 moment” referred to the “courage to object” to Joe Biden’s presidential election win.
The Saturday tweet was posted to Greene’s official Twitter page; her personal Twitter account was banned from the service last year after she used it to peddle falsehoods about the 2020 election.
Credit: Source link
